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John H. Doe writes "According to CNet, tiny worms kept in special aluminum canisters aboard the space shuttle Columbia (which broke apart in the atmosphere back in Feb. 1, 2003) survived their fall to earth. The small (about 1mm long) soil roundworm Caenorhabditis elegans was found alive in four or five of the recovered canisters, after an impact 2,295 times the force of Earth's gravity."

One plausible way (depending on a lot of factors like atmosphere, the size of the planet, etc) is that pieces of rock containing microorganisms could be ejected from the planet by a comet or asteroid impacting the surface. Another (more speculative) way would be that they could have hitchhiked on a spacecraft built by a more complex organism (as, in fact, Earth microrganisms have done in escaping Earth's gravity). The microbes could then make their way through space attached to something even if the organis

"...Who does not know that a horse falling from a height of three or four cubits will break his bones, while a dog falling from the same height or a cat from a height of eight or ten cubits will suffer no injury? Equally harmless would be the fall of a grasshopper from a tower or the fall of an ant from the distance of the moon..."

What about us who missed it the first time around? No-one complains that every TV station has a X o'clock news, X + 2 o'clock news and the X + 5 o'clock news, all showing the same stuff. Or even CNN and Fox News, 24 hours of mostly identical re-hashes of the same non-story.

Is your reason for existence simply to dig through the/. archives in search of dupes?

I hate to spoil the party, but this was news around April, 2003. This isn't really a source, but if you think about it, it's about as infallible as you can get. Behold, a Google Cache [64.233.161.104] of a weblog I wrote at that time, the server of which doesn't really exist anymore. It was back in the time of Chimera before it became Camino, back when RSS was cool. But of course don't take my word, I'm sure someone else can furnish a true news source to back this up...

Agreed, and I guess not only soil cushioned the impact. If the canisters broke loose from the bulk of the section of spacecraft they were in, then they might have hit the ground at a lower speed (there's a velocity point where the G pull downwards equals the aerodynamic drag - "terminal velocity", so it will depend on mass and aerodynamics of the canister).If they hit the ground inside a big chunk of the spacecract, then the deformation of this chunk also absorved part of the impact.

Don't forget that objects can exceed terminal velocity and that terminal velocity changes with tumble, thus it is influenced by everything that influences THAT. Bullets actually leave the muzzle above terminal velocity... Or at least, some of 'em.

bullets are powered. Terminal velocity has to do with "falling" objects. An orbiting object is a falling object. It is in free fall after all. Now if you fired a bullet straight up it may reach terminal velocity on the way down. Tumble? That has to do with drag as the original poster said. However tumble will only decrease the velocity. Nothing will make an object fall faster than it's terminal velocity.

Way under.1g probably.Probably had a little fraction of an once of impact force. Not surprising to survive especially as there was probably cushioning not accounted for and 2295 sounds extremely high.....

There is always a chance that there was firm evidence that there were live worms in four of the containers and strong evidence that there were live worms in the fifth container that died due to other causes after the landing. That would make the 'four or five' statement accurate.

Then there is a chance that the reporter is getting the information second hand and the person being interviewed doesn't know the full details of the evidence. (i.e. You know that there were several canisters of worms surviving an

According to a more detailed article, there were six canisters with worms in them and five were recovered.

I do find it interesting that the worms were 'four or five generations' removed from the originals. This could be where the confusion comes from.

It would, unfortunately, be a typical mistake made by a reporter. I've seen far too many instances where the facts get mangled by someone who doesn't quite understand what they are talking about when they translate it for the masses.

Are a full 50% of the articles in the submission queue from trolls hoping to trick the editors into posting dupes or misleading article summaries? Or do the editors simply select those articles, for reasons that aren't clear to the rest of us?

Did they really hit that hard? I mean how did they come up with this number, cause Im sure the terminal velocity of a canister, or even fragments of the shuttle if it just happened to be in a portion of the shuttle, would have enabled it to hit at a much slower force.

Seriously, this was my first thought reading this as well. Not only does that figure seem to completely ignore the likely terminal velocity of the canister, I'm betting it supposes an inelastic collision. I'm sorry, did the can of worms land on an extremely large plate of hardened titanium? No, it probably landed in dirt someplace...

Last time I played Worms World party my worms died after falling about 3 inches! You're telling me these worms survived a fall from space? Now thats a cheat code.
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